Virtual machines (VMs) provide one mechanism for an enterprise to reign in the costs of expansion by reducing hardware expenditures. However, the introduction of VMs into an enterprise presents new challenges in the data management of the new VM environment. New systems have been created to address issues such as backup management of the VM environment. Typically, these systems include a backup management server, a backup storage system, and one or more virtual backup appliances (VBAs), which are VMs in the VM environment that include logic for backing up the other VMs in the environment. An example of such a system is EMC® Avamar/NetWorker (Hopkinton, Mass.).
In a typical backup scenario, the backup management server may send a request to one or more of the VBAs to request backup of one or more VMs to the backup storage system. The one or more VBAs receive the request and then fetch the VM disk files for the VMs in the system and transmit the disk files (possibly after deduplication) to the backup storage system. However, while this works well for smaller backup jobs, for larger jobs with many VMs, this backup methodology runs into problems. A particular issue is with performance and maintaining service level standards.
When a large backup request is submitted to the system, the system may attempt to execute the individual jobs (e.g., a backup job for an individual VM) of the request all at once. This creates a risk of having the system run out of memory or suffer reduced performance. One possible solution to this issue is to better size the underlying environment. For example, an administrator may size the environment to have a large memory capacity. However, this may not always be feasible as the requirements of the real life system may differ greatly from the estimated requirements.
Thus, there is a desire for a better system to manage the resources of the VM environment and backup system during the execution of a backup request.